Thursday, July 23, 2009

We are pleased to announce the release of Darcs 2.3.0. This is the second of our time-based (biannual) releases and we hope to have many more. Here are some of the key changes from the last release:

Better performance - we believe the darcs whatsnew command is now much faster for hashed repositories. If you notice these improvements, you may be pleased to know that Petr's Summer of Code project aims to extend these improvements to the rest of Darcs. In the meantime, you may also notice improvements in darcs record and darcs changes; reduced memory consumption in darcs check and repair; and also support for hardlinks on NTFS, which allows for faster repeated retrievals on Windows.

Easier installation - Darcs now uses the Cabal build method by default which greatly simplifies installation. Combined with the upcoming Haskell Platform, building Darcs from source is now painless, even under Windows. Future versions of Darcs will use Cabal only.

Improved repository integrity - The new "darcs gzcrcs" feature detects and repairs files with a broken CRC in your darcs repository and caches. To the best of our knowledge, these files were only produced by Darcs 2.0.2 - 2.1.2, and only within "old fashioned" (non-hashed) repositories, and only the CRCs are affected. In any case, we highly recommend upgrading to Darcs 2.3.0 so that you can repair any such files. See issue844 for more details.

Darcs 2.3.0 requires GHC 6.8 or higher, and we recommend using GHC 6.10 for best results. See the official release announcement for more details about this, as well as a more complete list of bug fixes and new features.